Quotes For Gardeners

Leisure, Rest, Fallow

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Home Process Philosophy Cloud Hands Blog

The end of labor is to gain leisure.
- Aristotle

It is well to lie fallow for a while.
- Martin Tupper

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)

I am once more seated under my own vine and fig tree ... and hope to
spend the remainder of my days in peaceful retirement, making political pursuits
yield to the more rational amusement of cultivating the earth.
- George Washington

The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how
any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes
into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our
habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work
made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our
souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash,
to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.
- Sam Keen

The true object of all human life is play.
Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure.
- Irwin Edman

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing,
of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear,
and not bothering.
- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labour, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven!
James Thomson, 1700-1748, Spring

Leisure is the time for doing something useful.
- Benjamin Franklin

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
- James Thurber

The supreme accomplishment is to blur
the line between work and play.
- Arnold Toynbee

I would not exchage my leisure hours
for all the wealth in the world.
- Comte de Mirabeau

We are closer to the ants than to butterflies.
Very few people can endure much leisure.
- Gerald Brenan

Leisure is the most challenging responsibility a man can be offered.
- William Russell

They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh.
The dignity is in leisure.
- Herman Melville

Millions long for immortality who don't know
what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
- Susan Ertz

Hard work doesn't harm anyone,
but I do not want to take any chances.
- Author Unknown

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.
- Thomas Hobbes

Few women and fewer men have enough character to be idle.
- E.V. Lucas

Working in the Garden - Quotes for Gardeners

He did nothing in particular, and did it very well.
- W.S. Gilbert

Leisure may prove to be a curse rather than a blessing, unless education
teaches a flippant world leisure is not a synonym for entertainment.
- William J. Bogan

The real problem of leisure time is how to keep
others from using yours.
- Arthur Lacey

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
- Sydney J. Harris

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time
as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place
on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality,
are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why
shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens,
why not in our own.
- Mirabel Osler, The Garden Bench

Play - Quotes for Gardeners

Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
An important gardening judgment: When to Do Nothing!
How can gardening be considered a "leisure time" activity?
The wise gardener knows when to stop.
We garden day by day, bit by bit, breath by breath - our slices of enlightenment.
Not to move either hand - garden zazen.
Pause every so often when gardening to celebrate just breathing.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions: The Maxims of Gardening

He enjoys true leisure who has time to
improve his soul's estate.
- Henry David Thoreau

A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.
- William Henry Davies

After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
- Murphy's Laws

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives;
it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
- Agens Repplier

Once in a while you have to take a break and visit yourself.
- Audrey Giorgi

I will age ungracefully until I become an old woman in a small garden,
doing whatever the hell I want.
- Robin Chotzinoff

Sitting in the Garden - Quotes for Gardeners

If bread is the first necessity of life,
recreation is a close second.
- Edward Bellamy

There is something wrong with my eyesight.
I can see going to work.
- Teddy Bergeron

Spirituality - Quotes for Gardeners

I knew in my heart that I wanted to know the garden intimately, to know all the flowers
in each season, to be there from spring through autumn, digging, pruning, planting,
feeding, rejoicing. In short, I had fallen in love.
- Elizabeth Murray

Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to get an early start.
- Edgar Watson Howe

There can be no high civilization where
there is not ample leisure.
- Henry Ward Beecher

If you are losing your leisure, look out;
you may be losing your soul.
- Logan P. Smith

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.
- Cicero

What a wonderful
day! No one in the village
doing anything.
- Shiki

Learn to pause ... or nothing worthwhile will
catch up to you.
- Doug King

One of the greatest necessities in America
is to discover creative solitude.
- Carl Sandburg

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)

More Quotes

for

Gardeners